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Wednesday, October 02, 2013

`Rest Under the Shade of the Trees'

“The land
where we are now, is covered with small second-growth pine, and looks as if it
had been under cultivation once, but probably worn out and abandoned for more
fertile regions. Part of the woods that we have been through is grown up to oak
and other solid timber of all sizes, and has probably been forest from time
immemorial.”

Fewer
pines stand today on the land where the Battle of Chancellorsville took place
in April-May 1863. Among the hardwoods, oaks, maples and beeches predominate.
The park’s website describes the grounds as “an eastern
North American riparian and woodland habitat on a substrate of the Appalachian
Piedmont and the Atlantic Coastal Plain.” When I parked in the visitor's center lot, the tree in front of the car was a ten-foot sassafras just starting to
redden. The
leaves are trilobed and remind me of alien footprints.
I pinched a sprig and savored the scent. The passage above was written at
Chancellorsville by Private Wilbur Fisk of the 2nd Vermont
Volunteers to his hometown newspaper, the Montpelier Green Mountain
Freeman,on Nov. 29, 1863, six months after the
battle. His correspondence is collected in Hard
Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861-1865
(eds. Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt, University Press of Kansas, 1992).

Dozens of
photographs of men who fought at Chancellorsville are mounted on the walls of
the visitor’s center, including one of Capt. Charles F. Lewis of the 119th
New York Regiment. 119th New
York Regiment He was a student at Union College in
Schenectady, N.Y., when he enlisted at age eighteen in 1862. I lived in
Schenectady for six years, worked as a reporter for its newspaper and still
know members of the Union faculty and staff. In the rare books collection there
I held, for the first time, a copy of Whitman’s self-published first edition of
Leaves of Grass. Lewis, like
Whitman’s brother George at Fredericksburg, was wounded at Chancellorsville.
Lewis’ brother-in-law, Elias Peissner, a professor at Union College, was killed
in the battle. Lewis survived to be in the audience at Ford’s Theater on April
14, 1865, the night President Lincoln was assassinated.

In the gift
shop I bought a copy of Ernest B. Furgurson’s Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave (1992). Furgurson numbers
Confederate veterans among his ancestors, and served in the Marine Corps during
World War II. I started reading his book in the visitor’s center and resented having
to close it in order to drive back to my in-laws’ house. Later, returning to
the book, I started to understand the importance of trees on a battlefield,
particularly at Chancellorsville and the Wilderness. Describing Sickles’ attack
on the night of May 2, and how the Confederate sought shelter among the trees, Furgurson
writes:

“…one of
McGowan’s South Carolinians lay flat in terror as soldiers’ shouts and curses
rang and cannon roared. `We knew nothing, could see nothing, hedged in by the
matted mass of trees,’ he recalled. `Night engagements are always dreadful, but
this was the worst I ever knew. To see your danger is bad enough, but to hear
shells whizzing and bursting over you, to hear shrapnell [sic] and iron fragments slapping the trees and cracking off limbs,
and not know from whence death comes to you, is trying beyond all things. And
here it looked so incongruous—below raged thunder, shout, shriek, slaughter—above,
soft, silent, smiling moonlight, peace.’”

That same
night, May 2, Lt. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and his staff were mistaken
in the dark for Union cavalry. Confederate sentries fired on them and Jackson
was struck three times. A military surgeon, Dr. Hunter McGuire, amputated his
left arm but Jackson died of complications from pneumonia on May 10. McGuire reported
Jackson’s final words:

“A few moments before
he died he cried out in his delirium, 'Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action!
Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks' -- then stopped,
leaving the sentence unfinished. Presently a smile of ineffable sweetness
spread itself over his pale face, and he said quietly, and with an expression,
as if of relief, 'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the
trees."